Sunday, 23 December 2018

The social media giant, Facebook is working on a new crypto-currency for use with its WhatsApp messaging service, designed to allow users to transfer money across the app, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The company is developing a Stable-coin, which is a form of digital currency that’s pegged to the U.S. dollar, almost like a fixed exchange rate system. The Stable-coin would allow for significantly less volatility compared to the likes of mainstream crypto-currency like Bitcoin as it would be pegged to actual, real-world currency.

The company is reportedly still in its early stages of developing the new Stable-coin. In fact, it’s still working on the strategy for the project, with a Facebook spokesperson confirming that the company’s block-chain team is still exploring the different applications of crypto-currency.

WhatsApp is highly popular in India, with more than 200 million users. Add to that the fact that India leads the world in remittances, with more than $69 billion sent home to India in 2017, and it becomes obvious why Facebook chose it as the first location to test the new Stable-coin integration.

"Like many other companies, Facebook is exploring ways to leverage the power of block-chain technology,” a company spokesman said in a statement. “This new small team is exploring many different applications. We don’t have anything further to share.”

Speculators also suggested that Facebook Maybe Cooking up The Following;

>> A crypto wallet with a “FaceCoin” to pay for goods and services from partner merchants or from Facebook ads, significantly lowering the costs of such transactions by skipping credit card transaction fees.
>> Sending crypto-currency to friends to share bills and other expenses, rather than requiring users to connect a credit or debit card to Messenger as is the case today.

>> Use block chain technology for security and identity verification reasons, with an improved user interface compared to the hassle of using other decentralized applications (dapps) today.

With this new coin coming, Facebook could just fork bitcoin into a corporate version.